Gnu Regression, Econometrics and Time-series Library

Is a cross-platform software package for econometric analysis,
written in the C programming language. It is free, open-source software.
You may redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU
General Public License (GPL) as published by
the Free Software Foundation.

gretl conference 2015

The fourth biennial gretl conference will take place in Berlin on
June 12-13; details here.

Gnuplot

Gretl calls gnuplot to generate graphs. We require gnuplot
version 4.4.0 or higher, but version 4.6.5 (the current
release as of May 2014) or higher is recommended. See
gnuplot.sourceforge.net.
The gretl packages for MS Windows and OS X include a gnuplot version
that works well with gretl. For guidance
on installing current gnuplot on Linux, please look
here.

The gretl manual comes in two PDF files, a User's Guide and a Command
Reference. English versions of these, formatted for U.S. letter-size paper,
are included in the gretl source package and binary distributions. Gretl will
access the other available versions -- namely English (A4 paper), Italian and
Spanish -- on demand, via the Internet. You can also find the manual files
here.

If so you may wish to join the
gretl-users mailing list.
This is a moderate-volume list where people request and offer help, discuss
new features and so on. The list archive is
searchable.
There's also a gretl-announce list;
this is a read-only list which sends out announcements on the occasion of new releases of
gretl.

You can submit
bug reports
and
feature requests
using the SourceForge Tracker system. But please note: we request that you use the bug tracker
only if you're fairly sure you've really found a bug; if you're uncertain, please send a
message to one of the gretl mailing lists first. (Needless to say, if gretl crashes you've
really found a bug alright!)

Do you have ideas or code that you'd like to contribute to gretl? If so,
we'd be very pleased to hear from you. You should probably join the
gretl-devel mailing
list (this is fairly low volume).

The only requirement on code
that can be contributed to gretl is that you must be willing to have
it appear under the GNU General
Public License (GPL), that is, you must be comfortable with having the
source released.

As mentioned above, gretl is (mostly) written in the C programming
language, the most common language in the realm of free, open-source
software. However, not everyone is comfortable writing in C. So you
should be aware that this need not be a barrier to contributing code or
algorithms. If you can supply a well specified algorithm to accomplish
some interesting econometric task, we can probably either interface with
it or rewrite it in C without too much difficulty. Possibilities
include code in Fortran or C++; code written in a high-level matrix
manipulation language such as Ox, Gauss, Octave, Matlab or R; and even
pseudo-code, that is an algorithm spelled out explicitly, step by step,
but not in any particular programming language.

First of all, thanks to Ramu Ramanathan, Professor Emeritus
of the University of California, San Diego, for open-sourcing
his "ESL" econometric code, which was the starting point for
the development of gretl. Professor Ramanathan is author of Introductory
Econometrics (Dryden, currently in its 5th edition). Ramu has
also been a very helpful critic over the course of gretl's
development.

Many people have sent in useful bug reports and suggestions for gretl's
development. We are particularly indebted to Ignacio Díaz-Emparanza,
Tadeusz Kufel, Pawel Kufel, Dirk Eddelbuettel, Sven Schreiber and
Andreas Rosenblad. A. Talha Yalta plays a helpful role in scrutinizing
and reporting on gretl's numerical accuracy.

Thanks to William Greene, author of Econometric
Analysis, for his permission to include in the gretl package
some datasets relating to interesting examples in his text.

Thanks to the good people on comp.lang.c and
gtk-app-devel-list@gnome.org for expert advice on many
issues. Thanks to Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation
for all his work in developing and promoting free software, and more
specifically for agreeing to "adopt" gretl as a GNU program.